Human behaviour can be a confounding thing. There was some debate a while ago [1] about whether bike helmet use may actually lead more head injuries due to factors like drivers passing closer to helmeted riders vs. unhelmeted ones or riders riding more recklessly, among a tonne of other factors. I still prefer to wear a helmet, but its an interesting example of how difficult it can be to engineer human behaviour.

Another good example of this is how civil engineers adding safety factors into design of roads - lane widths, straighter curves, and so on - leading drivers to speed more and decreasing road safety overall.

1. https://bigthink.com/articles/the-bike-helmet-paradox/

Did the US allow all the other nuclear countries to develop nuclear weapons? There are quite a few states that could easily and quickly develop their own nuclear deterrent and the US is in a much worse position now to deter them from that.

Tell that to Iran.

To me, it's when narrative has priority over accuracy. There are a number of popular edutainment figures who fit this mold, but Gladwell is probably the most prominent example.

Apparently it was acceptable to use s or z in words like catalyse or analyze in British English until Microsoft Word came out with a British English spellchecker that picked the s spelling as its standard. Whether this is just myth or fact seems to be a point of controversy.

Most academic and technical writing in the UK still uses the z form, and the OED and Collins dictionaries tend to prefer it, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling

In popular writing, the s forms dominate - I've not heard the MS Word explanation before, but the most popular UK-produced word processors and spellcheckers in the 1980s (eg. Locoscript/Locospell, Protext/Prospell, 1st Word) tended to come from companies in the Cambridge area or which were founded by Cambridge grads, so would naturally have used the s spellings by default.

> Most academic and technical writing in the UK still uses the z form

'z' forms are generally used for writing for an international audience, it hasn't really caught on more generally than that.

I'm British, but when submitting papers for blind review, always use American spelling for obvious reasons. I suppose I could change it after acceptance, but that would just be pretentious.

I learned British English starting in the 80s and using s whereas z was used in American English, together with tre instead of ter (eg. theatre), was a big difference. And I can tell you that MS Word back then was just not there so this sounds like an urban legend but let the British people in HN chime in.

Both -ise and -ize are UK spelling. One is favoured by Oxford and the other by Cambridge.

No, see (even the new) Fowler's Modern English Usage. British usage is -yse, but right-and-proper Oxford spelling uses -ize, not -ise, for words with a Greek root.

It's not just that they are adding AI to every single product, it's being pushed on customers in incredibly intrusive and irritating ways that makes it seem as though they're desperate for their AI investments to pan out. If your AI productivity enhancement stuff is so amazing, shouldn't you be turning away customers at the door due to demand instead of brow beating me into finally signing up for it in submission?

This is what gets me with the AI promotion. If it's so good at increasing productivity, then where's all the result? Currently, we still have shitty software, updates that break things (Windows password icon?) and zero day threats.

How about tech companies focus on the actual problems first rather than desperately grabbing attention for a product that doesn't seem to deliver anything useful and instead hallucinates and regurgitates falsehoods. It's the opposite of a benefit and we're burning up the planet to make ourselves worse off.

The master bath in my parents' old place had a massive bathroom and gigantic shower that seems to be all the rage now in more "luxurious" bathroom designs - often with a bathtub in the shower as well. I had to use their shower once while I was there, and it was terrible - it was cold and drafty in the shower, even with the shower on its highest setting. Luxury shouldn't be uncomfortable.

I have definitely noticed this when I've tried doing Advent of Code in Rust - by the time my code compiles it typically send out the right answer. It doesn't help me once I don't know whatever algorithm I need to reach for in order to solve it before the heat death of the universe, but it is a somewhat magical feeling when it lasts.

As a hypothetical example, when making a regex, I call `Regex::new(r"/d+")` which returns a result because my regex could be malformed and it could miscompile. It is entirely reasonable to unwrap this, though, as I will find out pretty quickly that it works or fails once I test the program.

People form parasocial relationships with AI already with content restrictions in place. It seems to me that that is a separate issue entirely.

I avoid the automated checkouts in part because it takes jobs away from robots. Am I a bad person for creating jobs for humans?

I confess I am a hypocrite though, as I'm one of those job-stealing people that return the cart to the corral.